Sports Practice Session Planner

A drill generator answers the wrong question. Standing on a pitch with ninety minutes, fourteen players and no bibs, you do not need the name of one drill — you need to know what happens for the whole ninety minutes, in what order, and which parts are impossible with the kit in the bag. This builds that: blocks that add up to exactly the time you set, every activity filtered against your squad size and your equipment, and the group split into working units that add back up to the number of people in front of you.

Sport

Session length (minutes)

The blocks always add up to exactly this.

How many players

Drills that do not work at this number are left out.

Seed (optional)

A word reproduces the same session — useful across two squads.

Your session plan will appear here.

What this generator does

Produces a timed session rather than a drill name. The drill generators elsewhere on this site hand you one activity and stop; this decides how long each part of the session gets, which activity fills it, how many groups the squad splits into, and — for interval blocks — how many whole sets of work and rest fit inside the minutes available. Anything your squad size or equipment rules out never appears.

How to use this tool

Pick the sport, or leave it on the general shape if yours is not listed.
Set the session length and how many players will actually be there.
Tick only the equipment you genuinely have — anything unticked is treated as unavailable.
Press build. Swap any single block you do not like without re-timing the rest.

Understanding the controls

Sport: Changes the shape of the session, not just the vocabulary. Football runs technical work into possession into a phase of play into a game; basketball separates handling from shooting from defensive footwork; tennis has no possession phase at all. Each sport has its own drill bank.
Session length: The blocks always total exactly this. Warm-up and cool-down are capped in absolute terms, so a three-hour session does not open with half an hour of jogging — and if the equipment leaves too few blocks for those caps to hold, the page says the block is running longer than usual rather than quietly returning a short session.
How many players: A hard filter, not a hint. A five-against-two rondo needs seven bodies and a seven-a-side game needs fourteen; below those numbers the drill is simply not offered. It also decides how many groups the session splits into, and those group sizes always add back up to your squad.
Equipment: Every drill needs all of its kit, so a possession game that depends on bibs disappears the moment you untick bibs. If a whole phase has nothing runnable, the session says which phase it dropped and why rather than leaving a silent gap.
Seed: A word reproduces the identical session. Useful when two squads should train on the same plan, or when you want last week's session back.
Swap this block: Replaces one activity and leaves its minutes and every other block exactly where they were. The replacement is drawn from the drills not already in the plan, so a swap cannot produce a duplicate.

Worked examples

90 minutes, 14 players, full kit: Six blocks totalling exactly 90 — warm-up, technical, possession, phase of play, small-sided game, cool-down.
The same session with bibs unticked: The possession and small-sided blocks change to activities that do not need to tell two teams apart.
60 minutes, 4 players: No rondo, no phase of play, no seven-a-side. What is left still totals 60 minutes.
An interval block of 5 minutes at 40s/20s: Five whole sets, no change-over left over. Four and a half minutes would give four sets and 30 seconds, stated.

Common use cases

Planning tonight's session on the way to the ground
Handing a written plan to an assistant coach who is taking the session for you
Running a session at an away venue where the kit is whatever fits in the car
Covering for somebody else's team at short notice
Building a season's worth of sessions that do not repeat the same drill every week

How this generator works

Phases that have nothing runnable under your squad size and kit are removed first, before any minutes are shared out — allocating first and dropping afterwards would leave the session short. The remaining phases are then given whole minutes by the largest-remainder method, so proportional shares that do not come out whole still total the session length exactly. Each phase draws an activity from its filtered bank without repeating one already used. Interval blocks then fit as many whole work-and-rest sets as the block holds, and report whatever is left over as change-over time rather than squeezing in a set that would run the session over.

Randomness and fairness

Randomness decides which eligible activity fills each block, and nothing else. The phase order, the minutes per phase, the group split and the set arithmetic are all derived rather than drawn. With a seed the choice becomes reproducible through a documented non-cryptographic generator — that is for repeatability, not for anything that needs to be unguessable.

For how randomness is produced across the whole site, see how Generate Random works.

Assumptions this tool makes

Everybody listed is available for the whole session and able to take part in all of it.
The equipment ticked is available for every block, not shared with another group partway through.

Limitations and good to know

It arranges published, generic practice activities. It is not a coaching syllabus and has no opinion about whether the session suits your squad's level.
It knows nothing about pitch or court size, so the areas quoted in the drills are conventional starting points to adjust.
Nothing is saved between visits — copy the plan or use a seed to get it back.
The phase ordering is the common teaching convention rather than a law, and is stated as such on every session.

Common mistakes

Ticking equipment you might be able to borrow: Tick only what will definitely be there. The filter is the feature — a plan containing a drill you cannot run is worse than a shorter plan.
Setting the squad to the size of the register rather than who turns up: Set the number who will actually be on the grass. Two players short is the difference between a workable small-sided game and standing around.
Expecting the swap button to re-time the session: It deliberately does not. Swapping keeps the block's minutes so the shape you liked survives the change.

Practical tips

Build the session with the kit list you will actually take, then pack from the plan rather than the other way round.
Use a seed and note it in your session diary — you can reproduce the exact plan months later.
If a whole phase keeps dropping out, the message names the equipment that would bring it back.

Privacy and your data

Nothing you enter leaves your browser. There are no player names to enter here, and the sport, length, squad size, equipment and seed are never uploaded, stored or written into the page address. Analytics records that the tool ran and how many blocks it produced, never your settings.

Frequently asked questions

How is this different from the drill generators on this site?: Those give you one activity. This gives you the session: how long each part runs, what fills it, how the squad splits, and how many sets fit inside an interval block. A drill is a draw; a session is a structure with arithmetic in it.
Why did a block disappear?: Because nothing in that phase's bank can run with the squad size and equipment you set. The page names which phase it dropped and why, rather than leaving a gap or suggesting something undoable.
Do the minutes really add up?: Yes, exactly, every time. Proportional shares of a session almost never come out whole, so the remainder is handed out one minute at a time rather than rounded away. The blocks you can see always total the number you typed.
Is this fitness or medical advice?: No. It arranges generic practice activities against a clock. Warm up properly, work at a level that suits the group, and stop anybody who is unwell or in pain.